Let’s Chat

We appreciate all your enthusiasm and comments on our blog. We do read the comments, and it’s clear there are concerns around Yahoo! Messenger’s chat rooms. So we want to address some of them.

Right off the bat, we want to let you know there was an outage the weekend of January 12th that prevented users from signing into the chat rooms. This is uncommon, and we were able to fix it. We appreciated your patience as we tackled the issue.

As some of you know, since Yahoo! Messenger’s chat rooms began the Internet has evolved and as a result, we’ve seen problems occur in the rooms with things like bots and other disruptions that can take the fun out of a chat. We are aware of these problems and continue to work on solutions.

Recently, we discontinued our web-based chat rooms. If you were using web-based chat, we hope you’ve installed the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger and started using its chat rooms. Since this changeover, we fixed a few bugs. Recently, if you clicked to ignore someone in a chat room, the next time you signed in to Messenger, the person was no longer on your ignore list (so you had to ignore the person again). We have corrected this to preserve ignore lists, so if you still have that problem, please upgrade to the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger. Also, if you’re not seeing chat text when you’re in a room, turn off the Messenger preference that is set to ignore anyone who is not on your contact list. You’ll find this under the Messenger menu > Preferences > Ignore list. (Thanks to reader “bart” for the tip!)

We also know many of you enjoyed our user-generated public chat rooms, which were discontinued. We will not be able to bring them back as a feature. But as a Yahoo! Messenger user, you can easily set up a private conference over IM with many friends at once.

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